Wanted

Wayne, Jenni and I went to see Wanted this weekend. I absolutely loved it.

I really liked the amount of choice that the characters exhibited in the fight / chase scenes. Bullets are flying, cars are crashing and the characters are moving as though through a choreographed dance. It’s possible to simply dismiss their flipping cars and dodging bullets as mere Hollywood magic, but what if we lived in a world where this was actually possible.

The explanation given in the movie is the characters have hyperactive adrenal grands that kick their perceptions into high gear. Scientists are doing some interesting experiments on time perception that suggest that time perception is, in fact, malleable:

There’s two components to the film though. Not only are the characters capable of perceiving a large amount of information, they are also capable of acting on it reasonably. This is directly counter to the general effects of adrenaline which tends to be really bad for decision making.

Malcom Gladwell, in the book Blink, paints the picture of a world where we are awash in information. From a researcher who can predict divorce with 95% accuracy from an hour of a couple’s conversation to a man who can consciously perform the 43 possible facial actions that make up all expressions, he gives multiple examples of how there is untold depth present all the time.

He is building a case for why intuition is often a more reliable basis for decision making than the rational mind. It isn’t that intuition taps into some mystical universal unconscious, but simply accesses a much wider array of information than the conscious mind does.

He closes the book with an interesting story and a question. He discusses the shooting of an unarmed Guinean immigrant, Amadou Diallo, by New York police officers. Diallo was scared and fleeing when the officers shot him and Gladwell asks the question of why, if intuition is so skilled at making quick decisions, did these men make such an egregious error?

Gladwell paints an interesting picture centering around an interpretation of how autism functions. One of the central themes in his argument has to do with heartrate and our physiological response:

Dave Grossman, a former army lieutenant colonel and the author of On Killing, argues that the optimal state of “arousal” — the range in which stress improves performance — is when our heart rate is between 115 and 145 beats per minute. Grossman says that when he measured the heart rate of champion marksman Ron Avery, Avery’s pulse was at the top of that range when he was performing in the field. The basketball superstar Larry Bird used to say that at critical moments in the game, the court would go quiet and the players would seem to be moving in slow motion. …

“After 145,” Grossman says, “bad things begin to happen. Complex motor skills start to break down. Doing something with one hand and not the other becomes very difficult…. At 175, we begin to see an absolute breakdown of cognitive processing…. The forebrain shuts down, and the mid-brain — the part of your brain that is the same as your dog’s (all mammals have that part of the brain) — reaches up and hijacks the forebrain. Have you ever tried to have a discussion with an angry or frightened human being? You can’t do it…. You might as well try to argue with your dog.” Vision becomes even more restricted. Behavior becomes inappropriately aggressive.

Back in my undergrad I did a couple workshops on Tai-Chi. One of the more interesting experiences was when the instructor took a break for a bit of boxing.

As he described it, if we get hit really hard we close up our bodies and go into an automatic self-protection mode exactly as Grossman describes in Blink:

In an extraordinary number of cases, people who are being fired upon void their bowels because at the heightened level of threat represented by a heart rate of 175 and above, the body considers that kind of physiological control a nonessential activity. Blood is withdrawn from our outer muscle layer and concentrated in core muscle mass. The evolutionary point of that is to make the muscles as hard as possible — to turn them into a kind of armor and limit bleeding in the event of injury. But that leaves us clumsy and helpless.

Unlike normal boxing where the point is pounding, tai-chi boxing is a mutual agreed light pummeling. Each of the participants is paying attention to their responses and working at maintaining their mental stability. At the point that things are too fast or too hard then they slow them down.

I went to a meditation retreat and listened to a person discuss physical pain while sitting. She said that there is a space between the nerves signaling discomfort and the mind understanding that sensation as pain. My experience has held this to be true and it goes to the root of the reaction / response dichotomy. In finding the space between what happens and how we respond, we can choose to do anything we want.

I’m still something of a novice at it. I’m about as unaware of my body as anyone I know. Maybe if I get better at paying attention the ability to slow down time will just happen, and I suppose then it’s off to assassinhood with me.